Volunteers Cleaning Stray Dock

Oregon officials have organized a group of volunteers to scrape off, bag up and dispose of the hundreds of millions of marine organisms that hitchhiked aboard a boxcar-sized dock that floated across the Pacific during last year's tsunami.

State Parks and Recreation Department spokesman Chris Havel said Thursday biologists have identified one as a marine algae native to Japan known as wakame (wah-KAH'-may), which has established in Southern California, but not yet Oregon.

That has officials concerned about the spread of invasive species.

The Japanese dock floated ashore Tuesday along the Oregon coast.

Havel says officials have not decided whether to tow it off the beach or cut it up in place for disposal.